Read “The House of the Dead,” an Original Short Story in the Supernatural Alt-Victorian World of Mark Latham’s The Lazarus Gate and The Iscariot Sanction

Constable Larry Ecclestone opened his eyes with no small amount of effort. His every bone and muscle ached, his mouth was so claggy that it refused to open, and he was almost certain he’d been shot or stabbed at least once.
Larry looked around him, but he might as well have been unconscious still, for the darkness of his surroundings was absolute. He was lying on something soft and damp, and he became increasingly aware that the odour of the place was overpoweringly vile. With a strain, he moved his arms and began to scrabble around, trying to get a sense of where he was. His fingers alighted on something slick, cold and wet, which stuck to him as he recoiled.
The special constable was not one for panic, but even his stout heart began to beat a little faster. He took a deep breath to try to clear his head, and regretted it at once as the smell of death assailed his nostrils and made him retch. He fumbled in his jacket pockets, and was dismayed that his cosh and brass knuckles were missing. He went to his trouser pockets, and was thankful when he discovered his matchbook. He took it out and scrabbled his fingers around inside, counting four matches and praying they would be sufficient.
The first match fizzed and Larry’s eyes stung at the flare of light. They barely had time to adjust before the match began to die out, but what Larry saw in those brief moments made his stomach churn and the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. He was in some kind of brick-walled cellar, goodness knows how big, and he was lying on a bed of human remains. Some of the corpses were recognisable as people, though in various states of decay, but others were bloody messes, tangles of congealed gore and innards—as if they had been turned inside out.
Larry’s fingers burnt as the horror of his situation dawned on him. The match went out and he stifled a cry. He had seen terrible things in his time, but there was something different about this, and not just the fact that he was lying amidst the bodies like one of the deceased. Someone had done something terrible to those people, and his skin crawled at the thought that he was touching them. Worse still, through his aches and pains he did not know how badly he was hurt. Oh God! What if his own guts were hanging out like the things he had just seen? The thought passed quickly enough and the constable swallowed his fear. He would hardly have been able to move a muscle if he was in that bad a state, he reasoned.
Just thinking things through made Larry feel better, and he resolved that instant to get to his feet and find a way out. As he did so, something brushed past his ankle—a sudden movement that made him fair leap up from the pile of corpses. The shock of that was forgotten soon enough when the pain shot through his legs. He had no idea how long he’d lain there, down with the dead, but the exertion of using his legs was too much. He stumbled forwards awkwardly, hitting the rough brick wall and struggling to stay upright. He heard a chittering noise, and fumbled to strike a second match. This time he braced himself for the flare, and in the weak yellow light he saw three fat, brown rats running away from him, scurrying over the mound of flesh, bone and rags.
‘You’ll not be gnawing on Larry, not today,’ he muttered.
Larry quickly glanced around the cellar. There were several low, vaulted arches around him, all vanishing off to darkness. Over to his right the cellar floor seemed to slope upwards, and he was sure he could make out a faint outline of stone steps. Where there were steps, he thought, there must be a door.
The match went out, and he was about to light another when he heard a noise coming from somewhere behind him. Too loud for a rat, this time… it was a shuffling, snuffling sort of noise, like a shaggy dog ambling lazily along the flagstones. But there was something else about it, an underlying scraping sound, like claws, or a knife. All he could do was stand still as a statue and try to pinpoint the source of the danger. As he strained his ears to listen, the sound came again, but softer and somehow wetter this time. Then he realised he was listening to the unmistakeable sounds of bestial chomping on bones and sinew.
Bugger me, he thought. It’s eating the bodies. Bugger me.
He took a tentative step away from the sound, following the wall so as not to fall. As he did so, he became aware of an uncomfortable feeling in his right boot. At first he worried that he had an injury to his ankle, then it dawned on him that his captors had not been as thorough as he’d imagined. Painful memories flashed through his mind of the attack in the House of Zhengming, of Boggis’ screams. He remembered being overwhelmed and darting down a corridor, but becoming confused by the warren of passages and connecting rooms of the opium den. He remembered Clegg’s eyes as the Chinamen caught him and put a sword through him. And then he remembered something else, something far worse, which had lain in wait for him through a twisted wooden doorway. He trembled with fear for the first time in a long time, and that same fear spurred him on. He slowly reached down to his right boot and found the flick-knife tucked away there. He pulled it out and continued on his way as stealthily as he could, keeping to the wall, and minding his step as he ascended the gently sloping floor that was slick with blood.
Larry had barely made it more than few yards when he noticed that the noise of ghoulish feasting had stopped, replaced by a soft breathing. Then the original noise came again, a loud sniffing, and a shuffling, and the dreadful scrape of claws on stone. It was coming closer, and Larry knew he’d been discovered. If it was a beast—and he hoped that was all it was—then it could probably smell him, and smell his fear.
‘Right, you ponce,’ he whispered, steeling himself as best he could. ‘Let’s be ’aving you.’

He struck the third match, and everything happened at once. The snuffling thing came at him from the mound of the dead like a shadow, its eyes shining violet in the flare of the match. Larry’s courage may have held, but his wits told him to run. He spurred his legs to action, and half ran, half staggered up the slope until his boots struck the stone steps. The match fell to the floor, plunging the cellar into darkness, and in that moment something heavy threw itself at Larry’s back. He fell to the ground, hitting the steps painfully, but managing to roll onto his back to at least try to defend himself. His arms flailed at darkness, and at first met thin air until something wrenched at his left wrist and he felt small, sharp teeth bite deep into his flesh. He screamed in pain, terror and anger all at once. He drove his knee into the bulk of the creature, to no avail. He slashed with his knife but hit nothing. He felt something claw-like land on his chest and begin to scrape at him, and this gave the desperate constable the cue he required. With the thing’s head latched onto his arm, and its own arm on his chest, he gauged at once where its vital parts must lie. As it ragged at his arm like a bull terrier with a rat, he took his knife and swung it at where his attacker’s neck must surely be. There was a snarl, and the biting ceased, though the clawing intensified. Larry screamed at the top of his lungs.
‘’Ave it, you gobshite!’ he roared, plunging the knife into the thing’s flesh over and over, until it was a dead weight against his body and he could feel its blood oozing onto him, seeping into his ragged clothes. He rolled it off him, and started to crawl blindly up the steps.
There was one more match remaining, and he struck it. Ahead of him, along a short passageway, was a wooden door with a heavy bar across it. And yet no sooner had he lit the match than he heard more sounds behind him. He spun around, and saw a pair of dark shapes with sparkling violet eyes begin to shamble upwards from the mound of corpses, moving awkwardly and jerkily towards him. He needed no further motivation. Larry ran to the door, lifted the bar with all his might, and flung it open. Red light streamed in through the doorway, blinding him. Whatever lay out there was better than what was behind him. He threw himself through the door and slammed the door shut.
Larry found himself in a cobbled side street in a slum. It looked like the East End still, though exactly where he could not be sure. His head spun as if he’d just stepped off a merry-go-round. He wheeled around frantically, seeking to shut fast the door before his diabolical assailants could reach him, but to his amazement the door was not there; there was only a solid, red-brick wall that seemed to encircle a yard beyond. There was no-one about, and at first Larry thought it was dusk, given the redness of the sky. But when he looked about him, he realised that the sky was not just red, but burning, as if the very clouds were fire and ash. He heard screams, some far off, some nearby, and some, he thought, in his head. And over it all was a shadow on the sky, a writhing mass of intangible, smoke-like tendrils that clawed at the heavens as if trying to escape the mortal firmament. Larry felt the shadow’s claws, scraping inside his head, and involuntarily put his hands to his ears to make the scratching stop, but it did not.
Larry had escaped one nightmare but entered another. He looked about, trying to make sense of it all, to summon some words that would stop his descent into madness.
‘Oh… bugger.’
The Iscariot Sanction is available now.